February 17, 2006

Collaboration is the key

Just had a coffee with Indranil Chakravarty, the Founder and CEO of Scicom Technologies. Xansa and Scicom are doing some interesting things together under the partnership relationship we formed some time ago, specifically in the utilities sector where we have brought together Xansa’s utilities knowledge and IT applications expertise with Scicom’s niche expertise in the field of GIS to support utility clients in their development and deployment of asset systems. We’re also starting to explore other potential opportunities to bring together Scicom’s and Xansa’s knowledge such as RFID in retail.

Indranil gave me his musings on partnerships and why we work so well together: it has to do with the open and collaborative nature of companies like Xansa, and the way we look at the world - if we don’t have expertise in certain niche areas, we’d rather form lasting relationships with companies like Scicom where the logic of ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ is highly applicable. We are also first to admit ‘this is the boundary of what we are good at’. Indranil feels that trying to form such relationships with the larger pure-play companies in India is more difficult as they appear less keen to collaborate; their scale makes them feel they can do everything themselves, even if they only have relatively shallow knowledge of an area. In effect they feel they ‘don’t need’ help from smaller companies like Scicom. There’s also a level of maturity and professionalism in companies like Xansa that makes the collaboration work well - it’s all about openness and transparency.